Just to add to the debate of XLR vs. RCA: I just finished working on a $5000 preamp and saw something surprising on the XLR IO's:
The XLR outputs have pin 2 shorted to pin1, and directly in parallel with the RCA outputs (so pin1/2 going to ground and pin3 to signal). This by itself is not great as it is by no means balanced, but at least it's not dangerous.
More concerning was the inputs: they did exactly the same! Pin1 & pin2 are shorted right at the plug. This will be detrimental to certain sources since the one phase is driving a dead short-circuit. Most/all sources have output protection so it will doubtfully break anything, but the poor output driver will have terrible distortion on the shorted phase that can feed into the other phase.
Just goes to show, the interconnects is only a small part of the bigger picture. With this device, XLR outputs will fare the same to RCA and with inputs, most likely worse.
(and no, I will not mention the product name since it is irrelevant and I'm sure not the only product on the market doing this).
The XLR outputs have pin 2 shorted to pin1, and directly in parallel with the RCA outputs (so pin1/2 going to ground and pin3 to signal). This by itself is not great as it is by no means balanced, but at least it's not dangerous.
More concerning was the inputs: they did exactly the same! Pin1 & pin2 are shorted right at the plug. This will be detrimental to certain sources since the one phase is driving a dead short-circuit. Most/all sources have output protection so it will doubtfully break anything, but the poor output driver will have terrible distortion on the shorted phase that can feed into the other phase.
Just goes to show, the interconnects is only a small part of the bigger picture. With this device, XLR outputs will fare the same to RCA and with inputs, most likely worse.
(and no, I will not mention the product name since it is irrelevant and I'm sure not the only product on the market doing this).
